AI That Can Read Minds? Deconstructing AI Hype

Here’s an example I ran across recently: A headline from a large-circulation daily’s web page screams:

“No more secrets! New mind-reading machine can translate your thoughts and display them as text INSTANTLY!”

Not just “instantly,” notice, but “INSTANTLY!”

The Daily Mail is the United Kingdom’s second biggest-selling daily newspaper.

…

As with all hype, there is some truth in the piece. A headline like “New AI outperforms humans by a factor of a BILLION!” could be written about a calculator that computes specific values of trig functions. Calculating the cosine of 27.3 degrees from scratch to six significant places is a laborious time sink for a human being. Most cheap calculators can do it in the blink of an eye.

The Daily Mail article is misleading in a similar way. We are led to believe that the AI application can do something much more unexpected and significant than it actually can.